Starter  Write these words in alphabetical order: Paris, grand, jouer, aller, tennis, biologie, intelligent, manger, glace, chien, avoir.  Write “V” next to the verbs  Write “N” next to the nouns  Write “A” next to the adjectives

Réponse:  aller (V)  avoir (V)  biologie (N)  chien (N)  glace (N)  grand (A)  intelligent (A)  jouer (V)  manger (V)  Paris (N)  tennis (N)

 For your GCSE assessments it is essential to be able to use a dictionary well by:-...knowing the different types of words which make up sentences (verb/ noun/ adjective)...having the skill to identify/select the correct word(s) from a dictionary....using the grammatical information in dictionaries successfully to your advantage

Nouns in a Dictionary  When you need to find the French for an English word, you fist need to decide whether you are looking for a noun, verb or adjective  Which word is the noun out of the following: buygivehappymonkeystupid Remember, a noun is the name of something!

What’s in a name?  Let’s look up “monkey” to see what it is in French.  You should find something like this:  Monkey [‘mΛηkι] singe nm

Monkey [‘mΛηkι] singe nm  Monkey – the words in bold are the words you want to translate  [‘mΛηkι] this tells you how to pronounce the word in bold type.  singe – this is the French noun which means “monkey”  n – this is telling you that the word is a noun.  m – This tells you that “singe” is a masculine noun.

Monkey [‘mΛηkι] n singe m  How do you say in French:  A monkey  The monkey  A shirt  The shirt  A head  The head

But I want two!  The majority of the time, you simply have to add an –s to the end of a noun to make it plural in French. There are, however, some exceptions.  Look up “bateau”

bateau, pl ~x [bato] nm boat  We know what boat is.  We know what [bato] is ~x ?~x ?~x ?~x ?  The ~ means ‘put the word you looked up here’.  the x is what you have to add to make the word plural.  So boats =  bateaux

Find the French for:  birds  animals  cakes  fires  jewels

The essentials 1.Use your common sense – if a word ‘feels’ wrong, it possibly is. If in doubt, look the word up in the opposite section of the dictionary. 2.Read carefully the information from the dictionary about the type of word it is. (Particularly important if you are looking up a word which could be used in two ways). 3.If a word has two or more unrelated meanings (e.g. bat – the animal/the cricket equipment), the dictionary will generally have two separate entries for it. 4.Always read the examples given under the entry – you may find something useful. 5.If in doubt about plurals, the German – English section of the dictionary (front section generally) will give this information so find your word there. 6.Remember that most of the time, you will not be able to use the German verb as it is in the dictionary – it will need conjugating

BAD DICTIONARY SKILLS (A French example) Fred wanted to write in his assessment, “I saw a film”. He found the word “scie” (which means ‘saw’ – that you use to cut wood), and wrote the sentence ‘Je scie un film’, which is incorrect. This could have been avoided by:- -Fred remembering that ‘saw’ is a part of the verb ‘to see’, and remembering that he would need to look up ‘to see’ (voir) and conjugate it into the past tense (j’ai vu) - he should have looked carefully at the entry in the dictionary. When he saw lots of references to wood, he may have realised he was looking at the wrong word.

Use your dictionary to find the word for:  to help  help (support)  match (to light a fire)  match (football/tennis)  bat (cricket/rounders)  to fly  to book (holiday)